…YES, BUT WHO IS BEING TELEPORTED?
You may remember the late 1950s science fiction movie The Fly with David Hedison and Vincent Price, or its 1986 remake with Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis. In both movies, a scientist is trying to revolutionize transportation systems by creating teleportation, and decides to test the device on himself, attempting to teleport himself from one place to another. The experiment succeeds... to a point, because unbeknownst to the scientist (Hedison in the original movie, Goldblum in the remake) a common house fly managed to enter the teleportation device and to be "scanned" in the initial computer scan. When he is "molecularly reassmbled" at the end of the process, needless to say some of the fly has been "interpreted" by the computer as belonging to his original body, and thus, he is reassembled as part human, part fly, and from there the plot proceeds with predictable Hollywood scripting: both scientists increasingly become more and more fly-like and less and less human. In Goldblum's case, it's a crazing for nothing but sweets, which he consumes "like a fly." I'll just leave it at that, because if one hadn't seen the film, I don't want to ruin those rather grotesque and repelling scenes.
And of course, one need go no further than the original science fiction television series Star Trek to discover that teleportation systems played a basic technological role in the series, with the occasional episode even raising the metaphysical question (usually from the character of ship's doctor, McCoy, played by DeForest Kelley).
I mention all of this because there is a metaphysical problem lurking at the very heart of this dreamed-of technology, a problem I mentioned in last Monday's blog, The Resurrection Gambit. The question is addressed openly and explicitly in this article shared by M.D.:
Scientists Want to Teleport a Whole Human. A Quantum Breakthrough Could Make It Reality.
Now note what the article speculates, because it is at the core of today's high octane speculations and questions. The speculation begins with the article's own sub-headline, because, as it notes, there's a "catch" to teleporting a human being:
There’s just one catch: every atom in your body would be fully disassembled to the quantum level, effectively leaving your original body totally destroyed.
But assuming that the process could be done, what happens when one is "reassembled" at the other end? Of course, one answer might be that the body dies in the process (by the way, for reasons of quantum entanglement and non-locality, I don't think the body does die in such a process). But assuming it does not die, then what about those "metaphysical" questions? Here is where the article raises all those old questions that used to be raised on the old Star Trek series:
Like flying cars and time travel, this ability to instantly move something across physical space is deeply compelling—even if it seems impossible. But scientists are convinced that a breakthrough in quantum computing technology could make teleportation a reality.
So far, the most advanced teleportation experiments have relied on photons, but as recently as 2020, scientists discovered it might be possible to teleport electrons, instead, which can maintain their quantum states for longer periods of time.
So will the transport of more complex matter be next? If we can move light particles and electrons from Point A to Point B instantaneously, could we teleport whole atoms, molecules, living cells, and eventually some brave human test subject? And perhaps more importantly, even if we could find a way to teleport whole humans . . . should we?
After all, there’s no promise that all of the particles inside your body, once reassembled at its destination, will add up to one fully intact, fundamentally unchanged you. (Emphasis in the original)
Note firstly that in order to "scan" an entire body and reassemble it, a vast and "quantum leap" in computing power would be required, one most likely involving quantum computing or some as yet unknown derivative thereof. It is a necessity simply because of the sheer amount of data that would have to be calculated.
And here we encounter the first difficulty. In Monday's blog, The Resurrection Gambit, I noted that the problem with "de-extinction" of a human individual might, or might not, bring back the person concerned. On the view of the equation so common to public thought - the equation that soul, including all its bodily individuation, equals person -teleportation of the body would "reassemble" the person at the other end. In other words, the underlying assumption is one of the identity of the two things - in this case individuated body with all its faculties, and the person - and the underlying metaphysical assumption is materialism. But here we already encounter a difficulty, and the difficulty is one which aficionados of analogue musical recordings (a vinyl record) and digital recordings (a CD) know all too well: that digital version of of your favorite Bach or Beatles tune is a digital approximation of the actual analogue sound; the analogue recording is much more faithful, because it picks up all the subtle nuances of the original recording in the studio or wherever; it picks up the ambiance or environment and hence the subtlety of the music much better. Indeed, when one graphs the sounds on a digital versus an analogue recording, one immediately sees the difference that is making those subtle differences in sound: the digital waves are all formed from rectilinear, boxy components, whereas the analogue waves are smooth and curvy (depending on the instruments and voices).
And this highlights the first difficulty, for if what is teleported is teleported digitally, then what emerges a the end of the teleportation process is at best an approximate "recording" of the original. Over time, and several such teleportations (copies), the copy will be considerably degraded from the original, conceivably to such an extent that it is different than the original. Under the individual = person equation, then this means the original person has disappeared as a result of the process, which was precisely Dr. McCoy's whole philosophical problem with transporters in the original Star Trek.
The problem, however, does not disappear on the other view that individual and person are not identical nor interchangeable, even though it might represent a more stable basis on which to "teleport". On this view, I suspect, there is some "threshold of transduction" after which the link between the original individual and person are severed. On the view that the individual "transduces" the person, and thus that they are not identical, but that they do, to an extent, overlap, then several such teleportations might so degrade the ability of the individual to transduce the person that the link is severed, or indeed, that an entirely different entity is able to invade the degraded copy and either shove aside the original person, or "co-occupy" the individual. such "co-occupancy" cases abound in psychological and traditional literature (where they are called, respectively, schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder, and possession).
The bottom line here is that, while it may appear that scientific and technological advances are taking our civilizations far from its classical Greco-Roman, or Christian, or Hindu or Buddhist, roots, the reality is that the technologies and the science behind them are posing those questions as never before, and that the drive to do the science while ignoring the questions those civilizations asked, and the answers - and dire warnings and cautions - that they gave in answer to them, is a recipe for disaster.... a kind of Hollywood movie combination of The Fly and Jurrasic Park all rolled into one...
... See you on the flip side...
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